I have posted a mini-HOWTO documenting my experience installing Debian unstable on an ECS A900 (aka Novatech nBook). While it is a tail that is specific to this box and distribution, there are bits of it that are useful to anyone with a SIS630 laptop, and to most Linux distributions.
It can be found at http://dga.co.uk/howto along with various other simple HOWTOs for everyday functions.